Meet the team: Mel Bond
Here at the National Institute of Teaching, we are very proud to be the home of extraordinary research fellows such as Dr Melissa Bond. Her work on evidence synthesis is helping NioT to shape the future of the educational sector. ‘This is the widespread impact I’d always hoped to make with my research’, Melissa explains. ‘We’re providing direction for practice by undertaking our own primary research in classrooms, as well as secondary research through systematic reviews. This then feeds back into our own programmes and into the wider educational system. This is a chance to enhance educational outcomes across the board.’
Artificial intelligence needs intelligent decision making
Such research is also an opportunity to influence educational policy. ‘Our findings enable us to make recommendations to policymakers about best practice’, she explains. “For example, everyone needs to be thinking about how AI should be applied in education, but it also speaks to the wider digital learning strategy as well. How prepared are UK schools in terms of infrastructure? What funding is in place so that schools can get ready? What skills do our current and future educators have and need, and what upskilling needs to be in place to meet these needs?”
A curiosity and a drive to ask ‘why’
Melissa started her professional life as a teacher in South Australia, where she was born. So how did her journey bring her to the other side of the world, and eventually to a research career in which she divides her time between the National Institute of Teaching, University College London and the University of Stavanger in Norway?
During her ten years as a teacher, she was always curious about why some classroom techniques were more successful than others. ‘I worked across multiple faculties’, she explains, ‘mostly teaching German, but also IT, English, even Music and Drama. I led the Language and the Humanities faculties, and then IT provision. And all the time I was asking myself, what is it about these approaches that is helping teachers to teach and learners to learn?’
The transition from classroom teacher to educational researcher began when Melissa started her postgraduate journey. Chronic illness meant that she had to go back home and live with her parents. ‘But even when I was sick’, she smiles, ‘I was doing long-distance learning – Russian – to keep my brain ticking over and my love of learning alive.’ As she worked towards her Graduate Certificate in eLearning and her Master of Education, Melissa entered the orbit of passionate university educators who were happy to adapt to her circumstances. ‘This was before online learning was really widespread’, she explains, ‘and these lecturers showed so much empathy and compassion for my condition. They would record their Russian lectures on cassette and post it to me, or they would allow me to join in tutorials via Zoom. It was then that I started to realise how powerful digital learning could be, both for teachers and students.’
Research in practice in the classroom
By this time, Melissa had caught the research bug. ‘I found research so fun and exciting’, she says, ‘and I realised that I needed to understand why digital research can lead to such fantastic outcomes and transformative learning’. Initially, it was through action research in her own classroom that she began to see how effective these techniques could be. ‘I designed a whole German unit around World War 2’, she explains, ‘where students had to use different types of texts, such as poems, maps, and letters written by German-speaking prisoners of war. Then the students had to write their own letters from the same perspective, alongside logging how much they were reading in German throughout the unit in addition to their homework, as well as using an online language learning app and Pinterest to help organise their research.’ At the beginning, middle and end of the course, Melissa tested her students to gauge how their written progress was coming along. ‘I saw significant increases in their vocabulary, grammar and fluency’, she explains, ‘and it was hugely rewarding’.
Melissa’s classroom experiment became the basis of her first academic publication, a chapter in a book about text-based research and teaching. ‘This opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me, about how research could inform teaching practice and really help students with their engagement’, she says. As Melissa’s research journey continued, she found herself delivering professional development workshops and became a facilitator for the Goethe-Institut, which promotes German language and intercultural exchange. During this time, she began to assist teachers in using a wider range of digital tools, including the use of video conferencing and adaptive learning systems, especially for rural and remote students, and to make intercultural connections with students in German-speaking countries. Indeed, her Masters dissertation on South Australian students’ motivation to learn German showed that travel, talking to speakers of German, and German culture were among the top-rated motivating factors; all of which could be fostered through an increased use of using digital learning tools.
A global appeal
By this time, Melissa realised that, while her research was having a positive effect on the students and teachers in her home state of South Australia, it had the potential to have an even wider impact on educational outcomes worldwide. In 2016, she was invited to a conference organised by the European Distance Education Network (EDEN) in Germany. ‘I went to the conference and it blew my mind’, she explains. ‘To have this more global perspective on the research being conducted into digital learning, to meet the researchers whose work I used in my classroom, was just amazing.’ After the conference, Melissa was offered a PhD position at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. She went back to Australia and packed up her life. Three months later, she and her daughter moved to Germany.
For her PhD, Melissa conducted a mapping review of research published on digital learning over the past decade, as well as a systematic review of research on how the flipped learning approach affects student engagement. She was interested in the breadth of research on how student engagement is enhanced by digital learning, and how different technologies had impacted on that process. Her face lights up as she explains, ‘evidence synthesis is like looking at the galaxy of evidence that’s out there, rather than a single star in isolation’.
Generative AI has led to a massive increase in interest
It was through this work that Melissa came to explore AI as one aspect of digital learning. ‘About six years ago, researchers and educators really started grappling with how AI is being used in education, where it might be useful and where it might be problematic. Now with the rise of generative AI, we have seen a rapid increase in interest among policymakers and school leaders in the past two years, and a growing realisation that we need to work together to develop clear guidelines and robust infrastructure, as well as a pressing need to increase AI literacy, for both educators and students. To do this effectively, we need interdisciplinary and collaborative efforts between researchers, tool developers and educators.’, something she stresses in her most recent review.
What makes a good mentor
At the end of her PhD, Melissa came to the UK, to work on research synthesis software that had been developed in one of UCL’s multidisciplinary research centres, EPPI Centre. She briefly returned home to Australia to take up a lectureship in digital technology education at the University of South Australia, before family circumstances meant she had to return to the UK. It was at this point that the stars aligned, and Melissa began conducting research for the National Institute of Teaching. ‘My first piece of work was to synthesise research that had been conducted on the mentoring process’, she says, ‘so that NIoT could better understand the mechanisms that make for effective mentoring’, which was followed by an analysis of school job advertisements, to provide insight into ongoing issues of recruitment and retention.
Melissa now conducts research for NIoT and UCL, which means, as she puts it, ‘I have the best of both worlds. I’m conducting important work that feeds directly into NIoT’s programmes, and directly informs best practice in all sorts of ways, from ITT to CPD. We’re hoping that this will help NIoT and other programme providers to understand what is most effective and why.’
So where is Melissa’s research heading now? ‘In terms of AI in education, there are all sorts of exciting developments’, she explains. ‘We have to ask ourselves whether we are being ethically minded enough with our AI data. We have to think about how we work collaboratively to develop effective AI applications and AI literacy amongst students, teachers, teacher educators, and other educational professionals. How can generative AI be used to design lesson plans, or develop feedback for students on their work? How can AI be used for brainstorming ideas or helping students to deepen their understanding of a topic? And how can AI help students who have additional educational needs, or who have English as a second language?’
Melissa began her own digital learning journey in a time of cassette tapes sent through the post. This is a journey that has now taken her to the other side of the world, and through her research, her aim is to take other educators with her into the future. ‘NIoT was developed from the beginning with research in mind’, she explains, ‘and now there’s an ecosystem of research-based evidence that feeds straight back into its programmes. I started out as a teacher asking what helps teachers to teach and learners to learn. As a researcher I’m able to provide answers to this question, and share my findings with educators at all stages of their own journeys’.